When i make purchases with my credit card, i'm not worried about someone knowing it was me, Shadowrat, who made the purchase. When did people claim that you could anonymously buy anything with a credit card? Obviously that's stored in lots of places. I buy something online, the vendor needs to know where to ship it, my credit card company knows who to bill, amazon knows because they are passing the info on.

What i worry about is someone stealing my number. This Honestly, i don't even worry about that so much anymore since it's happened enough and i've come away completely unharmed, i'm just kind of numb to it.

So true. if 3 engines fail on a 2 engine plane, it pretty much destroys everything and resets the universe. a 4 engine plane is just the sane choice.

we use latin words to be unambiguous, but we come up with the latin names ourselves. the romans didn't name a rattlesnake crotalus atrox. They hadn't even determined the whole family genus species classification stuff.

Now, if we described stuff by it's percentages of fire earth air and water and spirit...

i get a statistic that in 2013, china produced approximately 1 coal plant a week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

unless we are talking about may 17, 2013. for that time period, china did apparently produce 1 coal plant a day.

i don't even know why i feel the need to argue this though. it has little to do with the topic. i just can't fight the urge to look up statistics. i think there's something wrong with me.

It's pure hubris to think that scientists in the future are going to go along with our stupid names for stuff.

what are the recruiters supposed to do? just start asking random women on the street if they want to work in IT? Even recruiters are limited to the pool of people that make it known they want those jobs.

I think you are making it too complicated. i thought it was because they heard agile was the best.

I grant that machine sentience is possible. It would appear as though a physical system can become sentient if i use ourselves as an example. It's also reasonable to assume that such an intelligence could become our enemy. Again i can cite numerous examples where known intelligences did become enemies.

The doom and gloom scenarios all hinge on this idea that the AI is going to be so much smarter and more powerful than we are. That's where it's dipping way into just crazy speculation. Based on what we know about intelligent beings, the system is full of flaws that slow everything down. For all we know, the AI may never be any better at anything than we are. I'd wager the first truly sentient AI's will be quite a bit duller.

I think it's important that we devote a little bit of thought to "how can we be nice to our AI when it becomes sentient." but not because of any impending doom. i mean really, if it IS self aware, it's only right to treat it as such and be nice to it. Honestly, we kind of have a good track record there. all the AI needs to do is watch star trek and see a whole bunch of episodes devoted to how Data was a wonderful person who should be respected and cherished.

I've been told there are some sects of buddhism that believe we can't possibly know any metaphysical crap and just need to focus on the here and now. i'm paraphrasing, but that sounds like a pretty rational basis to start with.

i dunno man... apples seem like a pretty good investment :)

http://9to5mac.com/2010/11/11/...

the give up starbucks (or your favorite coffee place) arguments are always a bit too simple. Taken at face value, it's an expensive cup of coffee, but what is it really? for many people it's a social event. You see the same people each day, you say hi. sometimes you meet friends and former coworkers who got a job at the agency around the corner. someone remembers your name and favorite drink. It's fun. it's hard to say that fun is or is not overpriced. If you can afford it, what is wrong with having a bit fun every day?

lucky for me, i ended up in a job where i can go make a fancy esspresso drink in the break room and hang out with people. i don't have to go EVERY day, but still, i like to go damnit. i see different people at the coffee house.

i also end up going to bars. i'm pretty sure that ads up to more than coffee each year.

wtf? i did school work. where's my $800,000!?

plumbing, as it turns out, is kind of a tricky beast. with all the plumbing analogies in EE, i figured, it's just like making a circuit. in practice, leaks and pressure are far from their electrical counterparts. it's not like your power supply delivers 3.3v if it's below the breadboard, or 9v if it's 2 feet above the breadboard.

i build my own stuff around my raspberry pi. i've got motion detection, temperature sensors, lights, garage doors, plant irrigators. it's all fun, but be prepared to spend a lot of time. If you are making this yourself, you are taking up electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, running to home depot. Everytime i do a project i tell myself, next time i'm just buying something.

then i come back and do another.

just be realistic about what you want. do you want good home automation? or do you want to putz about with computers and components? (for me, it seems to be the later)

logic has no place in religion.